Snowdon is a dummy

Nice damage control work, but who would be foolish enough to believe that Obama was not informed? More likely, he was THE PRIME CLIENT for such spying on his counterparts. Who wants to listen to a president/chancellor/PM, more than another president/chancellor/PM?

Say bye bye to your democracy then. Once the NSA can blackmail any potential leader or politician into submission, why even bother voting?

France must get better than the United States at economic intelligence rather than whining about U.S. phone tapping, which is no reason to suspend EU trade talks with Washington, its trade minister told Reuters on Tuesday.

Reports that the U.S. National Security Agency extensively intercepted its European allies' phone calls and emails including France and Germany have caused a diplomatic uproar.

Asked about the scandal, Trade Minister Nicole Bricq said the lesson was for Paris to improve its own economic intelligence gathering.

"Economic intelligence exists. There's no point in whining. I think we should be doing better, be better organized," Bricq told a Reuters Newsmaker briefing on Tuesday.

I know Bill, have been writing posts about that over the past few days/weeks. We need to built networks that the US can't break, and start sending all sorts of disinformation over the channels they can break.

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My opinion is that personal privacy is on its way out.

Say bye bye to your democracy then. Once the NSA can blackmail any potential leader or politician into submission, why even bother voting?

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My opinion is that personal privacy is on its way out. Our technological evolution is such that expectations of personal privacy on a level we have previously enjoyed is little more than wishful thinking.

An you are an expert on the internet and computer/internet security I assume?

You are up on such subjects as perfect forward security or the encrypted standards being now build into IP6 or VPNs or pgp or.........?

Frank Apisa wrote:

5) My personal privacy is NOT an important thing to ME. I post under my own real name…and frequently share opinions under my real name in newspapers and magazines.

I post under my real name, I write letters and share opinions in newspapers as well.
But: I have decided to do so under my real name (and if I wouldn't, letters wouldn't be posted/printed).
However, I want to share the content of my emails, phone calls, letters etc only with those with I want them to share.

Personal privacy was one of the main factors, why people in the former GDR liked to get unified with "the other Germany". We still have an upper-level federal agency, where everyone can look at what the Stasi knew about her/him or wanted to know ... still 34,762 times in the first half of this year (6,837,620 times since 1991) Germans did so.

Fine, Walter...you can have that opinion.

Is there some reason why I cannot have mine?

I do not care about my personal privacy...and I am of the opinion that a great deal of personal privacy is on its way out. I...as an individual...am not concerned with that.

Bill...if you cannot see the handwriting on the wall...I cannot help you. Encrypt to your heart's content.

Frank Apisa wrote:

Fine, Walter...you can have that opinion.

Is there some reason why I cannot have mine?

I do not care about my personal privacy...and I am of the opinion that a great deal of personal privacy is on its way out. I...as an individual...am not concerned with that.

Certainly you can have your opinion. (And 'thanks' that I can have mine.)

I do care about my privacy in so far that it is me who decides with whom I want to share. And if I want to share it. What part of it I want to share.

I do think, too, that spying/espionage can be very useful. For various purposes.
I don't think that spying on friends is any good - it's at least the beginning of the end of a friendship in my opinion.

Yesterday, I've met a retired US-officer, who was in charge of army's spaying in Berlin (and before in Frankfurt) for a couple of years. And since we were together all day, we didn't just talk about the weather and beautiful Rhine valley. Very interesting. A period a bit like in John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but never against friends and allies, he said ...

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Bill...if you cannot see the handwriting on the wall...I cannot help you. Encrypt to your heart's content.

LOL I do indeed encrypted to my heart content as for example when passing financial information by email with family members.

Footnote there is a nice open source/free program call locknote that combine a notepad type program with AES 256 encryption build in for text files.

https://www.steganos.com/us/products/for-free/locknote/overview/

Lot simpler to use and attached this program as a file to email then used the more powerful pgp software with special note when your are dealing with people with little computer skills or ability to set up pgp.

I also keep my master password file on both skydive and a memory stick on my car keychain using locknote.

You are limited to text files only so in keeping things like my family passports jpg images you need to employed a truecrypt volume or a 7-zip file.

Of course I also have my netbooks protected with truecrypt so if I am one of the millions of people who do loss their computers when traveling every year I do not need to worry about someone being able to access my privacy information on the computer.

Well...apparently there are some people who think one cannot accurately tell who is a friend without checking out some things.

Frank Apisa wrote:

Well...apparently there are some people who think one cannot accurately tell who is a friend without checking out some things.

Even with such I could agree - at least in the field of politics.
But 11 years monitoring the cell phone seems a bit long.
And wanting to know how many of some country's inhabitants are really friends seem to be a bit like ... a job creation scheme to call it more positively.

We should not lose sight of the fact that there are plenty of positives also.